Deborah Schamoni

Since the 1990s, Judith Hopf has developed a distinct artistic language in the form of sculpture, film,drawing, performance, and stage design. In her works, Hopf addresses social inscriptions and powerstructures in political and private realms, as well as the impact of visible and invisible architectures,technologies, and objects on the human body and its movements. Often referencing everyday as well as modernist and postmodernist aesthetic vocabularies, and employing materials such as brick, concrete, and glass, her works challenge habitual views, representations, and behaviors.

KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers) collaboratively traverse the boundaries between painting and sculpture, fusing both genres intoan altogether new, hybrid artistic approach. Containers for a kind of inter-subjectivity that both retain sand sublimates the artists’ individual hands, the works also offer a geologic logic, an organic history of their own making, as they preserve and pulverize or retool the former KAYA performance objects and ephemera into upcoming works, and re-use from KAYA’s past into a multiple, ever-becoming body. More recently, KAYA has moved beyond the figure of Kaya Serene and has become a collaborativeplatform that reaches beyond the artistic output of “Brätsch and Eilers” to incorporate the creativeenergies of the community that it builds around itself for each iteration of the project. Often times, thisincludes fellow artists, as well as students, curators, academics, and the institution that plays host to themany KAYA projects.

In her distinctive approach to painting, Murphy generates imagery through a combination of slow layering and fast applications of oil paint, animating a delicate urgency and sparking sensations of both epiphany and discomfort. Fictive characters are the focal points of Murphy’s paintings. The figures fluctuate under the viewer’s eye, revealing and concealing themselves behind and via the materiality ofthe medium. The paintings have evolved through Murphy’s experimental exploration of paint. In her hands, painting is an act of imaginative action—colour and gesture are live wires. The images committed to canvas arrive there through an ongoing process of reinvention. A true identity is revealedonly to then conceal itself and re-emerge as something other but no less true.

Photos: Simon Vogel, Mareike Tocha, Aurélien Mole